Hello,
I have a single Service Desk Analyst. (Yes, we are a small shop)
On a typical Monday morning there are about 10-12 emails, 2-3 IM's and phone calls that the agent deals with.
A Situation happened where he was busy on the phone and a service owner (a manager, we dont have formal ITSM processes) sent him an email to communicate the P1 outage to affected users)
The email got lost in the pile and it took about 45 minutes for the outage message to go out.
He then contacted the service owner who advised him that he has already sent him the details of the communication to be sent out.
My manager has asked me to take steps to ensure that the communication is sent out as soon as the service desk is notified of the outage.
Any advice?
How do you do this in your organization?

i don't think this is an issue with staffing, instead it's a pure process, procedure or communication issue.

in my team, we setup a very strict process for P1, P2 or escalations.
1. in this process, the communication is not only through email. i requested team to use phone call, instance message or any direct means to contact people.
2. time to own, respond and resolve, we only allow 15 minutes to own / respond, while 15 minutes for 1st level to investigate and 30 minutes for 2nd level to investigate.
3. we have a daily call to review all P1, P2 or escalation cases to understand where the gap is.

anyway, i think in your case, the people who used email to notify others a P1 case is not proper._________________Luo, Tian-Hong (Ken)
Regional Operation Lead